the author, writing in their very own restaurant (kitchen)
The way we market music is broken.
And we can fix it.
But first, I need you to indulge me on this. Your music?
It’s a restaurant.
After a decade of working as a music publicist, whose actual job is to get hype for bands, I have come to believe strongly that the majority of bands will make more money and waste less time and energy by treating their businesses more like restaurants and less like aspiring celebrities.
Restaurants are most often focused on attracting local and regional patrons.
They serve a regular clientele, whom they value and reward for their patronage.
They keep their offerings fresh and give people reasons to return again and again.
They are known for quality and they deliver consistently.
Don’t be fooled (be a restaurant)
The value of fame has been massively oversold.
We take for granted that we have to be famous or famousish if we’re going to realize our dream of having a successful career in music.
Come on, you may be thinking, you need lots of fans in order to make money.
But how many fans? And how much money do you need?
That depends on many factors, but one figure I find helpful is that you only need 1000 fans who spend $8.3333/month on your music in order to gross $100,000/year.
That’s like. Not that many.
Do you have systems in place to make it easy for fans to support you? Probably not, but I bet you could figure it out.
Do you have that many fans now? Probably not, but imagine if you went out and stood on the street corner with your guitar every single weekend and talk to people and shine your freakin’ light at them. I bet you could get to that first 100 in six months.
Even if those people don’t sign up for monthly donations, those would be 100 people in your local market who have seen your beautiful face in person and smiled at you and left a buck in your guitar case who remember you a hell of a lot better than if they saw a promoted post for your show on IG.
Restaurant artists are real!
And this isn’t just theory! I have had the extreme pleasure of working with a good handful of artists who are not famous and who make comfortable livings from their music.
They do this because they have done the following:
created music that connects deeply, even if it’s only with a small group of people
built relationships with these people, who continue to support their work
How you do this will vary widely based on your music and who you are as a person. But one hint I’ll offer is that most of your competitors are wasting their lives trying to be famous on TikTok. Acts of taking up space in the real world are subversive and radical and dangerous.
There’s more than enough business to go around
And speaking of only needing 1000 fans at $8.33/month to make six figures, I did some really janky math were I determined that roughly 1 in 1000 people upload music to Spotify. (The number is actually smaller than that since many of the artists who have music on Spotify are now dead or otherwise inactive.)
But say 1 in 1000 people are somewhat serious musicians. Think about that in terms of your neighborhood. If you’re there, there are roughly 1000 people around you who aren’t serious musicians. You could be the closest musician to them geographically.
People need music
As Susan Rodgers writes in her amazing book This Is What It Sounds Like, early speech in humans developed alongside music. It’s deeply innate and necessary to most of our wellbeing.
Now imagine those 1000 nearest non-musicians. What do you have in common? What have you been through together? What kind of community togetherness and release do they need? What kind of experience do you want to give them?
No customers in the kitchen
There’s been a lot of important discussion around how we treat celebrities following Chappell Roan’s recent videos. I was asked recently in an interview with
to discuss how artists can set boundaries and avoid toxic parasocial relationships.This is what I wrote in response and I think it’s good to include here in order to balance out my “build community” good vibes perspective . These are by no means my complete thoughts on the issue, but it’s what I’ve got for you all today.
I'm so glad that there's public discourse about fans and the access they feel entitled to. I'm glad artists are speaking up.
I've been on the receiving end of harassment and stalking. I have mixed feelings about offering advice about how to present boundaries, in large part because it implies that artists setting boundaries will keep them safe from harm, which is a lie.
I think artists should be supported by society at large in enforcing whatever boundaries feel right to them. But I think this is really a problem with how people feel entitled to the time, attention, kindness, and even bodies of women and femmes, both famous and not.
I was supposed to write about artist message embodiment this week but this post just came pouring out and it felt timely so here we are.
I will do my best to get the next one up before too long and that one will be about embodying your artist message.
Paid subscribers, on this week’s live Zoom I’ll be helping you all brainstor \m creative ways to bring your music into the physical world! As always, we’re meeting up at 12 noon Pacific. I cannot wait to see you there!
Unpaid subscribers, please consider joining our ranks - we have such amazing productive sessions.
Can’t wait to see you all there!
Heartening to know you only need 1,000 fans to support you, makes it feel more achievable 🙌
Yes!! I think of the "looking for a guy in finance" girl often. Fame blew up overnight and signed with a label... but then with no true "substance" and art ready, it falls flat fast. I think labels should invest more in artists that have been slowly building their following and craft rather than one hit 10 second trend on an app that's going to collapse in on itself in the next few years. Thank you for sharing this - never thought of a restaurant analogy before!